A Call for submissions
Welcome to Full Bleed, an annual print and online journal devoted to the intersection of the visual and literary arts.
In this year marking the hundredth anniversary of the Manifesto of Surrealism, we look forward to featuring in our next issue a selection of new manifestos for our own time and poetry in the ars poetica vein. A separate section of Full Bleed 8 will explore the topic of censorship.
Manifestos
From August 15 through November 15, we are open to submissions calling for new directions in art, literature, politics, cultural life, and collective imagining. Send us your boldest ideas and headiest visions, in any genre and form you see fit. We’re open to the contrarian, the exasperated, the polemical, and the aspirational. We welcome your credos and artistic fantasies and utopian schemes, your protests, howls, and leaps of faith. Tell us what we need now. Diagnose our ills and offer your cures. Purr, chant, or rage as you wish. How might your manifesto address sex and intimacy, technology and A.I., vectors of identity, aesthetic virtues, economic justice, violence and war, democracy, ecology, hybridity, free speech, pluralism, syncretism, animism, access, or none of the above? We’re happy to consider any and all approaches to the ever-timely genre that is the manifesto.
Ars poetica
We also seek new ars poetica poetry. Please send us one to three poems concerning the art or vocation of poetry, or the lives of poets. Collaborations between visual artists and writers are welcome.
Censorship
We are eager to receive submissions of visual art, criticism, literary prose, art and design history, reportage, and poetry considering acts of censorship, or that address censorship as a phenomenon in our time or times past, here in the U.S. or in other parts of the world. Additionally, we welcome narratives from the “front line,” so to speak. If you have been fired or punished for expressing your views or have had creative works, exhibitions, or acts censored, retracted, redacted, canceled, demonized, or deplatformed in some way, we encourage you to send us your work, or evidence of it, for consideration for inclusion in the issue along with a description of any related controversy and its consequences.
Details
The deadline for submissions via Submittable is November 15. If you would prefer to send us a proposal first, please do so by October 1, also via Submittable. Final selections will be made by January 15, 2025, by the journal’s editors and advisory board members. The issue will be designed and produced by participants in Publishing Culture, an upper-level, spring-semester elective at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and will launch in early May. We pay our contributors modest honoraria.
Before submitting, please review past issues of our journal and the guidelines below. (Print copies of our most recent issues may be ordered here.)
Important: To help us with our organization, please indicate the genre of your submission using the submission title field and the drop-down menu provided in Submittable. So, if you were to send us a manifesto in the form of a comic called "How to Save the World in Your Sleep", the Submittable title field would read: "Comic: How to Save the World in Your Sleep"; then, in drop-down menu, you'd select "Graphic Essays, Comics & Other Experiments".
Prose submissions: These should be double-spaced and include page numbers. If appropriate, you may include endnotes (in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style). Please do not send us anything that exceeds 7,000 words in length.
Poetry submissions: Send us no more than three poems in a single file.
Art submissions: Please send us a portfolio of no more than ten images, all included in a single file. You may provide an artist statement in our Submittable form or in the submitted materials, as you wish.
Genre-defying work: We love to see projects that combine word and image, collaborations between writers and artists, graphic essays, and other experimental forms. If your work doesn’t fit neatly into the ‘prose’, ‘art’, or ‘poetry’ categories, feel free to send it to us under the heading on our Submittable page called: ‘Graphic Essays, Comics, and Other Experiments.”
You may submit in multiple categories, but please only submit once in each category between 8/15 and 11/15.
We expect to have responded to all submissions by January 15, 2025, if not earlier. If you have not heard from us by that date, please feel free to send us a note. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but do notify us immediately via email (fullbleedjournal@gmail.com) if part or the entirety of your submission is accepted elsewhere.
We are excited to review your work and thank you in advance for sharing it with Full Bleed.
